And people wonder why Trump beat the Democrats in 2016. Bernie is, to his credit, open and unrepentant about his hypocrisy, but it is kind of amazing that he still gets away with statements like this. He’s multimillionaire communist who rants about income distribution, and not only has a private jet but who mocks the little people who have to wait in lines for commercial air flights, and he fear-mongers about cliamte change while spewing more carbon into the atmosphere than any random 1000 Americans.
He can get away with this because he correctly assesses the IQ (low) and ethics alarms ( busted) of the average progressive.
And then there is Hillary Clinton. Saying, in effect, “Hold my beer!” the sad, bitter and irrelevant almost-first female POTUS (I feel sorry for Hillary, I really do) went for hypocrisy gold with this post on “X”:
Hey, does that mean when you and Bill rented out the Lincoln bedroom for political contributions, you gave the proceeds to ‘the people”? And do ask your official hubby (if you ever see him) if he believes it is appropriate to get blow-jobs in other people’s houses.
The Axis of Unethical Conduct really is having to dig deep these days to find Trump activities to freak out over. Presidents (and First Ladies) have altered, added to, rebuilt and remodeled the White House for more than a hundred years, and nobody, literally nobody, made a big issue out of until Trump made the quite reasonable decision that the White House needed a ballroom. FDR installed a swimming pool. Nixon added a bowling alley. Truman had to oversee major reconstruction of the building because the place was literally falling apart. The White House doesn’t belong to the President but the President is its steward while he lives there, and making physical improvements. Naturally, this decision, which would not have drawn any significant criticism if the Clintons or Obamas had made it, is being attacked by anti-Trump legal ethicist Richard Painter, because the President will pay for the renovation with private contributions. “People who want to be in good with the president are going to write checks,” Painter whined to the The New York Times. “It’s just a whole extension of the pay-to-play problem that we’ve had in government for years,” he added.
You didn’t hear from Painter while the Biden’s were influence peddling over the pat four years, did you? I wonder why….
Trump also used the occasion to hand another “lie” to those who count them. “For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc. I am honored to be the first President to finally get this much-needed project underway — with zero cost to the American Taxpayer!” Trump bloviated in his inimitable manner.
But he’s lying! There is no way for him to know if any President had dreams about a White House ballroom. Put it in the data base!
Ethics Alarms 
That is not evident from the clip you linked. Is there another clip where he mocks people?
I think it’s the fact that he doesn’t think he should have to wait in line like ordinary people because his business is more important than theirs. Some people might consider it mocking their little lives and little pursuits.
As opposed to the time when our host let Senator Schumer cut in line ahead of him after hearing him turn down the suggestion that he use his position to move to the front. Public servants work for the people, not the other way around.
So the assertion here is that when Sanders says that using public planes would not be logistically feasible for traveling across the country fast enough for his campaign schedule, either he’s mistaken about the constraints or he should stick to a schedule that can be maintained with public planes, to show his integrity regarding his positions on climate change and economic inequality?
If so, I think that’s a fair and defensible assertion. It just needs to be spelled out. It’s not at all obvious that Sanders is looking down on people. I’m not aware of any reason to just assume that he doesn’t genuinely think that he has to keep a tight event schedule to maintain support from his voter base, which necessitates private flights.
If we want people to listen, it’s important to avoid overreach with the criticisms. That’s the mistake that Democrats make whenever they go after Trump.
Politicians campaigned for many, many decades without private planes. Bernie really is a communist who is constantly inveighing against great wealth, but this is conspicuous consumption. The use of private jets, and jet travel generally, is also hypocritical for anyone riding the climate change bandwagon. “My time is too valuable” is a garbage answer for a Senator: his job is to stay in Washington, be informed, and vote. he isn’t building anything. The speaking tour stuff is an avocation: he wasn’t voted into the Senate to do that. He isn’t paying for those flights, either: he raises money to take them, from other hypocritical socialists who would rather give money to a millionaire anti-capitalist than help the homeless.
Those are good points: If Sanders’s platform include climate change and wealth inequality, he should not be scheduling so many events that he has to hire private air travel, and those events are not important for his job. That’s a lot more solid than “Sanders is mocking the poor.” He may or may not be, but you can’t prove it to the satisfaction of someone who trusts him, and you don’t need to in order to have valid concerns about Sanders’s activities. Does that make sense?
I am going to defend Bernie Sanders here on the ethics charge, because although I believe he is wrong on many things, he is not a hypocrite at the point of using a private plane.
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, as I believe GK Chesterton said. But in this case there is no vice, as there is nothing unethical about the use of private planes. Why do people use private planes? Because time is scarce, either due to the money value of time, or because of opportunity costs and lack of enough time. Therefore use of a private plane can be justified on economic grounds for CEO’s because each hour represent a significant amount of dollars (> 10K), and for celebrities and politicians who need to visit a number of sites in a short amount of time. It is therefore not unethical for a presidential candidate to use a private jet during his campaign, just as it is not unethical for the President to use Air Force One.
The fact that Bernie Sanders is a socialist does not alter that ethical fact; the only point of criticism I have for Sanders are his socialism and his climate change doctrines. These are issues requiring substantive debate; his use of a private jet only illustrates that life is often stronger than doctrine.
If I would chide Bernie Sanders, and many other Democrats, as a hypocrites, then it is on the issue of using double standards. They are all falling over themselves to paint Republicans as Nazi’s based on juvenile comments in a chatroom by a group of nobodies, but refuse to pull endorsements for people such as Graham Platner who is planning to run for the Senate seat held by Susan Collins, and who sports a Nazi tattoo used by the SS (Totenkopf). And here I am looking at Bernie Sanders.
Commercial airlines aren’t that inconvenient for celebrities and VIPs. Their staffs handle the details. THey get the EZ passes to speed you through TSA. Everybody’s time is valuable. A private plane is a luxury no matter how you spin it, and the “why should I have to be inconvenienced like some schmuck?” tone of Sanders’ answer is hardly that of a working class hero. The guy’s a phony and he spouts nonsense: maybe everything he says strikes me the wrong way because of that.
My guess is we hear different things in Bernie Sanders’s response. You hear “why should I have to be inconvenienced like some schmuck?”, and I guess that you are referring to his 30,000 people are waiting phrase. My understanding of that phrase is that it refers to the 30,000 people visiting his campaign rallies waiting to hear him speak. So Sanders does not express disdain for people who fly commercial, but simply gives a practical argument of why he made use of a private jet during his campaign. In other words this is not a “Let them eat cake” response out of the mouth of a socialist.
I have never flown with a private jet, and I probably never will. I see it as an unnecessary luxury for myself, but I understand that there may be practical reasons why people may use or even own a practical jet. The validity of those reasons is less important from an ethics perspective. There is in my view nothing unethical about luxury, and therefore nothing unethical about private jets.
We should not have different standards for people based on where they stand politically, as having double standards is a hallmark of hypocrisy. If Republicans are allowed to fly with a private yet, then so are socialists.
My gut feeling is that the interviewer was asking Sanders a gotcha question.
(I never thought I would ever defend Bernie Sanders.)
Everyone is allowed to fly private jets. Nobody wants otherwise…except Bernie and AOC and their fellow travelers, whose “Green New Deal” aims at banning jets of all kinds….and want to make it impossible for big corporations and successful entrepreneurs to afford such luxuries. The President of the US needs a private jet by the nature of his job. Not a US Senator. Here’s an analogy: I am unalterably opposed to legal recreational drugs. I am interviewed and asked how I can justify using marijuana myself. I say that I have migraines and I’m not going to apologize for the conduct I oppose for others because I need my cannabis. OH! Bullshit.
And I should have mentioned this before: I’ll agree, arguendo, that Bernie’s 30,000 are the morons waiting to hear him and AOC advocate socialism. That’s a pure rationalization: “I don’t do it for ME< I do it for THEM!" Oh. Bullshit.
CVB, you make good points. But the point I will make is that, while Bernie Sanders may be able to show a legitimate need to fly privately, he is in NO position to label someone else’s need to fly privately as “illegitimate for the sake of climate.”
Bernie COULD fly commercial during campaigns but doesn’t. As a result, he has no moral high ground to claim some other rich person with a private jet SHOULD instead fly commercial.
Bernie Sanders’ claims to care about climate change fall flat when it’s only other people that are in any way inconvenienced by that care.
…and isn’t this really how socialism works?…my self-interest – supported by my position of power – allows me to do what I will while making demands of (or simply taking from) others?
It’s implicit! “I’m rich: why should I have to endure the indignities of the riff-raff? I’ve got important things to do.”
So do we all, dick-head. So do we all.
Bernie was inspired by the stocked stores he was allowed to see on his tour of the Soviet Union. The ones that only the VIPs and foreigners were allowed to visit.
From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs, indeed. When the government decides what it is each person needs, it’s amazing how much high-ranking politicians, celebrities and athletes need versus everyone else.
I mean, could you imagine an important person like a US senator waiting around with 30,000 other people to board the plane? Could you imagine him flying United??? Obviously he’s not going to do that….
PWS
It’s not the 30,000 people waiting at the airport. Sanders means the people waiting at the rallies. Sanders is only using the private planes as part of this week of campaigning. He takes commercial flights back and forth to Vermont. He doesn’t own a plane. It’s closer to a rock band on tour. If you are on the road for a week, and going to 5 different places, it begins to make budgetary and time constraint sense to use a plane. All this “pearl clutching” over his alleged hypocrisy seems ill-placed. He’s not getting this because of his wealth. He’s not paying for it. It’s a series of rallies across the country. It’s pretty standard for a private plane to be used in that situation.
Which is all fine and dandy, if he weren’t trying to tell everyone else that air travel will ruin the atmosphere and doom us all.
Either, he is telling us he is more important than world health, or he is a liar.
Wowza! Hmm. Why does the term “useful idiot” keep running through my brain? And why does “dacha” do the same whenever anyone talks about Comrad Bernie’s lakefront house in Vermont?
I think there are much worse things than flying a private yet as this is something that every Senator or billionaire could have done without criticism; it is not that he is campaigning with a Nazi tattoo on his chest……… (wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean)….
Isn’t there a basketball court somewhere under the Whitehouse where St. Barack of Obama spent most of his time balling with his buds.
If there is one unfair attack on Obama, it’s that he didn’t work hard enough on his job. He played some basketball and some golf. But he had much longer days than Trump, much shorter vacations, and played a lot fewer rounds of golf. He read lots, according to non-partisan biographies, and would talk to important thinkers from the right left and center even on his “off” days, trying to figure out intricacies of policy and politics. You may not like his policies–but he wasn’t even remotely lazy as president. The one thing I will say is that he would have been a better president if he wasn’t such a committed father/husband. He made a promise to be home for dinner 4-5 nights a week. He could have been spending a couple of those nights fundraising for Democrats or working dinners as president. A lot of us with much less impressive jobs struggle some weeks to match that commitment.
Calm down, the man is already married.
There was a tennis court as part of the White House grounds.
Obama, after securing permission from the various regulatory authorities, not only installed a hoop at each end but had the ground lines repainted so it could be used as a basketball court too, by temporarily taking down the net. Predictably, the GOP threw a fit.
After Trump saying the new ballroom would be built next to the East Wing, not touching it, contractors are now saying the whole East Wing has to be demolished to reduce costs, while bill has risen to $300 million for now.
I’m no expert on US law, but I believe there’s a law on the books preventing private parties from paying for the cost of Federal buildings, to avoid the obvious risks of corruption and money laundering. Please correct me if I’m wrong, as I may well be.
“Predictably, the GOP threw a fit.”
Link?
Could it be that the biggest reason that their is so much outrage at the ballroom is that like the Lincoln Bedroom, Truman Balcony, and the Roosevelt Room this might become known as the Trump Ballroom? That would be the biggest finger in the eye Trump could do to his opponents.
The issue about private parties funding construction or defraying costs that would otherwise be publicly funded seems to be an argument with limited substance.
Donors fund campaigns to get access. The last administration had Teachers Unions at the table making decisions on when to open schools and they were the big donors to the campaigns. Trial Lawyers fund candidates who are averse to legislating caps on damage claims. Those and the AFL-CIO are the two largest donor to Democrats. Are you telling me those donations don’t give them access to those to which they contribute.
A Federal building is a long lived asset that benefits any administration Democrat or Republican. To suggest that this is way donors gain access to people in power is ridiculous. You might just find out that some wealthy people give money away for public good. The new multi million dollar Boys and Girls club building in Hagerstown, The Washington County Schools Public Service Academy and Skilled Trades Center as well as the new medical school was built with private donations. Unlike those donations I doubt that the new ballroom will be named after the donors.
argh it’s there not their in the first line
Chris Marschner: “Could it be that the biggest reason that their is so much outrage at the ballroom is that like the Lincoln Bedroom, Truman Balcony, and the Roosevelt Room this might become known as the Trump Ballroom? That would be the biggest finger in the eye Trump could do to his opponents.”
I think that is a huge part of it. Trump is trolling the opposition because, even after he leaves, will leave a mark. And, will his successor just tear it down? Unfortunately, tat is a possibility.
For me, I am kind of ambivalent about the ballroom. One rendering I saw ruined the symmetry of the White House. Another that I saw looked better. Now, they are saying he is knocking down the whole East Wing. That is almost certainly a lie, but I should not have to try to decipher the truth from what is in the press. They should be giving us good info.
Generally speaking, though, having a ballroom on site is probably Trump’s attempt to elevate the majesty of the office, as well as the image of the country.
-Jut
“Now, they are saying he is knocking down the whole East Wing. That is almost certainly a lie…”
A sign of TDS then?
You jest, but yes. The obsessive leaping from one overblown and manufactured justification for vilifying Trump to another is indeed a symptom of Trump Derangement.
Presidents (and First Ladies) have altered, added to, rebuilt and remodeled the White House for more than a hundred years, and nobody, literally nobody, made a big issue out of until Trump made the quite reasonable decision that the White House needed a ballroom. FDR installed a swimming pool
I don’t think those were a big deal…because they’re just not a big deal. Tearing down the entire east wing for 300 mil with bulldozers is. Mixed with Trump’s awful taste…
A slippery slope, surely. Still, a defensible decision. Obama’s remodeling reportedly cost more than 300 million and wasn’t privately funded. It’s an 18th century structure long-insufficient for 21st century national leadership. I would mind the structural change more if it weren’t so difficult to get near the place now.
Did you mean the West Wing? The East Wing demolition was completed a few days ago, scattering asbestos and lead paint particles throughout the grounds and remaining buildings.